Thank you, Bazza, for those kind words. I put it down to swimming and a daily stiff gin and tonic. However, when it comes to WINNING then that's another bag of nails, isn't it just?

YOU CAN'T TELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Sodom and Gomorrah!
Who put that seductive nude
on the cover of the Bible,
and playing with a dildo too?

Is there nothing some promoters
will not do? Yet, and yes, there
always has to be a yet. . . get past

the porn, you might find
the exact Words you just
might need. Yes indeed.

Christopher T. George

nonsense verse
 

Competition No 127

You can't tell a book by its cover.
Mislabelling often annoys,
As when Lady Chatterley's Lover
Turns out to be Scouting For Boys

I once bought The Power & The Glory
At an airport en route for Corfu
But it wasn't the Graham Greene story,
Only Proust's Albertine Disparue.

I gave my Aunt Doris Othello
As she claimed to be fond of the Bard,
And was damned for a dirty young fellow –
Inside was Justine by de Sade.

A bad surprise always displeases,
And sometimes it makes you feel sick.
I've just opened Baum's Sexual Diseases
And guess what I've got? Moby Dick.

In my extensive research for this competition, I found some good examples of book designers who had not actually read the book:


http://i309.photobucket.com/albums/k...inson/rotk.jpg

nice one, Roger
 

got any more?

This was the best of the bunch I found here:

http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forum...?topic=19397.0

Soul on the Street cover is a gas...
 

though you would have to know, as US eratonauts may not, that William Roache plays Ken Barlow, a notoriously tedious character in Coronation Street, a long-running UK soap opera. He is the only cast member to have been in it since its inception in 1960 &, conflated with the character, is widely mocked & despised. No one could be less hip (or more hip than Ella).

You can't judge a book by its cover.
 You need to see the spine.
If it would look good upon my shelf,
 I want to make it mine.

I want to take it home with me
 to decorate my study.
I really couldn't give a damn
 if what's inside is cruddy

or makes no sense or bores me or
 the plot won't hold together.
Every book's a masterpiece
 whose spine is made of leather.

Ken Barlow is one of the few 'intellectual' characters to have appeared in a British soap. Fat lot of good it's done him.

Well it's stopped him being dead. Will it do the same for the rest of us intellectuals?.